She flicked her cigarette ash at me. “They’re always trying to impress you with how fast they can get the world to jump at a snap of their fingers, how every wish they think you have can be predicted and accommodated. So you go out and valet people open your car door, doormen open other doors, maître d’s pull out your chair, and the rich guy orders your meal for you. This is supposed to make you feel good, but it makes you feel enslaved instead, like you don’t have a mind of your own. Or,” she said, “a choice in the matter. Trevor probably wants us to feel that every one of his resources is at our disposal.”

“But you still don’t trust the room or the rental car.”

She shook her head. “He’s used to power. He’s probably not very good at trusting others to do what he’d do on his own if he were healthy. And once Jay went missing…”

“He wants to know our every move.”

“Exactly.”

I said, “I like the guy and all…”

“But too bad for him,” she agreed.

Mr. Cushing was standing by his Lexus out front when we stopped to look out the window from the mezzanine level. I’d gotten a look at the parking garage on the way in and saw that its exit came out the other side of the hotel and emptied onto a small street of boutiques. From where Cushing stood, he couldn’t see the exit or the small bridge that led off the island.

Our rental car was a light blue Dodge Stealth and had been rented from a place called Prestige Imports on Dale Mabry Boulevard. We found the car and drove it out of the lot and off Harbor Island.

Angie navigated from a map on her lap and we turned onto Kennedy Boulevard and then found Dale Mabry and drove north.

“Lotta pawnshops,” Angie said, looking out the window.

“And strip malls,” I said. “Half of them closed, half of them new.”

“Why don’t they just reopen the closed ones instead of building new ones?”

“It’s a mystery,” I said.

The Florida we’d seen until now had been the postcard Florida, it seemed—coral and mangroves and palm trees, glittering water and pelicans. But as we drove Dale Mabry for at least fifteen of the flattest miles I’ve ever driven, its eight lanes spread out wide and pointing infinitely through waves of rubbery heat at the overturned bowl of blue sky, I wondered if this wasn’t the real Florida.